Posthumous Portrait Research Articles

Posthumous Portraits in Motion: Experimental Animation, Metamorphosis and Reflections on Mortality

This article details an oil paint-on-glass animation depicting posthumous portraits of unclaimed deceased from a Johannesburg mortuary in South Africa. The creative project engages with Western traditions of posthumous, focusing on the iconography of the corpse. The author explores how these traditions are approached through the moving image, metamorphosis and experimental animation processes. The animation uses metamorphosis not just as a symbolic strategy to serve the idea of transformation – but also as a self-referential engagement with animation’s contradictory life-giving and destructive traits. The article and the creative project it illuminates present a critical awareness of the ethical concerns associated with representing the dead and the cultural and historical traditions from which this subject emerges.

Pyeongsaeng-do, Paintings of an Ideal Life by Chae Yong-sin - Self-fashioning by display of selected memories

<i>Pyeongsaeng-do, Paintings of an Ideal Life</i> by Chae Yong-sin, a part of the Lee Kun-hee Bequest now stored at the National Museum of Korea, is a ten-panel folding screen that depicts scenes from the painter’s life: at eight years old, he learns to read from his father; at thirty-one, he marries his wife; at thirty-seven, he passes Kwagŏ, the civil service examination and takes up a government position; at fifty-one, he paints a posthumous portrait of King Taejo; he serves as governor to Ch’ilgok-gun and Chŏngsan-gun; and celebrates his 60th birthday in 1910.</br>On the ten panels, Chae Yong-sin depicted important events of his life such as his successful career and participation in the production of King Taejo’s portrait, to present to and commemorate with his progeny his moments of glory. Important events were carefully chosen, edited, and drawn on each screen. The correspondence of represented events with the record of Chae’s life made by Kwŏn Ch’ŏlsu in 1924, the similarity in style of the people, buildings and other motifs to his other paintings, and the fact that he referred to himself as “an old man of eighty years” since he was seventy years old, all suggest that Chae actively participated in the making of this ten-panel painting around 1920. In addition, the painting faithfully reflects contemporary culture—the white patterns for pŏsŏn, changsŭng that acted as a signpost—, serving as an important visual document to how people lived in early modern Korea.

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

АРИЯ ИЗАБЕЛЛЫ И ПОСЛЕДНЕЕ СЛОВО ХРИСТА: ИНТЕРМЕДИАЛЬНАЯ ИНТЕРТЕКСТУАЛЬНОСТЬ В ПОРТРЕТАХ СЫНА ИОГАННА КУПЕЦКОГО

The article is in analysis of the visual, musical and textual aspects of the relevant scientific issue – the concept of intermedial intertextuality – on the example of two engravings created in mezzotint technique based on the selfportrait of the outstanding Baroque portraitist of Bohemian origin Johannes Kupetsky with his son Christoph, and on Christoph’s posthumous portrait. The first one was created by the Nuremberg engraver Bernhard Vogel, the second – by him or by his apprentice Valentin Daniel Preissler. In addition to the images, those prints contain poetic inscriptions, quotations and musical texts. In a lifetime portrait the musical text was identified as the incipit of an aria of the Baroque opera by Reinhard Kaiser. Thanks to it, the quote from Statius’s “Thebaid” in the engraving was associated with the experience of marital adultery. In the posthumous portrait of Christoph, accepting from Manus Dei a scroll with the emblem of “Τετέλεσται”, the motto bears the evangelical connotations – the execution of the sentence and the completion of the earthly path. The image of the siren on the emblem corresponds to the image of the personification of Eternity in the Iconology by Cesare Ripa. However, the siren in the Nuremberg mezzotint holds not a ball but a compass, outlining an incomplete circle – a motif associated with the personification of Perfection. The emblem on the mezzotint illustrates a syncretic image of Perfection found in Eternity

Picturing Political Power: Eighteenth-Century Korean Portraits in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum

Picturing Political Power: Eighteenth-Century Korean Portraits in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum

The Émigré and the General: Denis Volozan's Portrait of George Washington in an Atlantic Context

In 1802, the French painter Denis Volozan (1765–1820) completed a posthumous portrait of George Washington commissioned by the legislature of Delaware for its State House in Dover. A recent immigrant to the United States, the artist had relocated to Philadelphia from the island of Saint-Domingue at the height of the Haitian Revolution. Once it was unveiled, however, the painting provoked widespread public dislike. Hidden from view, it was barely saved from destruction in the 1960s. Though the choice to entrust Volozan with such a project may have seemed like poor judgment to contemporary audiences, this article argues that his portrait illustrates the symbolic reinterpretation of Washington by transatlantic French diasporas in North America and the Caribbean, of which the painter was a part. Volozan was familiar with depictions of both European elites and figures of power like Toussaint Louverture, whom he had sketched in 1800. As such, his approach to American political portraiture was a result of greater dynamics of circulation in the Atlantic world. Celebrating a patriotic figure, his Delaware picture was nonetheless shaped by the political and cultural interactions between France, Britain, and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Adatok II. Lajos magyar király páncélos ábrázolásaihoz

Most of the posthumous portraits of Louis II, who died in the battle of Mohács in 1526, show him in armour. In some pictures he is wearing fictitious armour, but in other portraits he is clad in the armour which until 1939 was believed to had once been his, but actually had been made in 1533 for the Polish king Sigismund II Augustus and is currently kept in the Hungarian National Museum. The author of the study has examined the latter group of artworks. She describes the armours of Louis II, some only mentioned in archival sources or historical works. Some items that can certainly or presumably be attributed to him are kept in museums abroad. The first paintings in which Louis II is wearing the gilded ornamental armour were painted by István Dorffmeister in the mid-1780s. Since at that time the armour was on display in one of the gala rooms fitted out in Vienna’s Kaiserliches Zeughaus in the 1760s, the study discusses the history of the imperial armour and weapon collections and the conception of the arms exhibition in the Zeughaus at that time. After the demolition of the Zeughaus in 1856, the armour was transferred, together with the rest of the imperial collection of armours and weapons, to the war museum wing of the newly built Arsenal. The armour was presented by the Austrian catalogues of the museum as belonging to Louis II, and some items had illustrations added to them. The armour was introduced in Pest in 1876 at a historical exhibition for charitable purposes, and later in 1896 at the Millennial Exhibition. The Hungarian press also devoted articles to it, and several scholarly papers were written about the armour.The prototypes for some of the 19th century artworks depicting Louis II in the Viennese armour – most of them local monuments preserving the memory of the battle – were István Dorffmeister’s paintings. His battle scene showing the death of Louis II appears in a sketch of an unrealized monument, dated 1846; in the picture painted on metal that adorned the monument in Mohács in the 1860s and on the bronze relief replacing it in the late 1890s. The antecedents to another group of representations must have been the 19th century Austrian and Hungarian descriptions and illustrations of the armour attributed to Louis II. The ruler wears this armour in several book illustrations and on the statue by Ferenc Vasadi on the Danubian facade of the Hungarian Parliament building.Although these artworks presenting Louis II in Sigismund II Augustus’ armour do not satisfy the iconographic criteria of historical authenticity, they were up-to-date for their time, for instead of depicting the fictitious, often waywardly fantastic armours of earlier centuries, they presented the portrayed person in an existing armour made in his own era, that is, with a historically authentic appearance.

Lost and found: the posthumous portrait of Louis Agassiz by Henry Ulke (1876), and their noteworthy relationship

Despite today’s controversy regarding several aspects of his legacy, Swiss-born Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was one of the most eminent scientists of his time. After his death, Washington-based photographer and amateur naturalist, Henry Ulke (1821–1910), honored his ‘esteemed friend’ which is clear from his personal letter of condolence addressed to Agassiz’s eldest son Alexander, and a posthumous portrait (oil on canvas) dated 1876. In 1877, his portrait was purchased by the United States Capitol, but it was not accepted by the Joint Committee on the Library. Thereafter, it soon went missing and remained unnoticed for nearly 150 years, until the same portrait (or at least a second, original version) was brought to auction in 2013 by heirs of the Ulke family. The painting is based on a rare carte-de-visite photograph, which bears the 1876 backstamp of Henry’s brother, Julius Ulke (1833–1910). Both the painting and the card, undoubtedly depicting Agassiz, were once mislabeled as General Francis E. Spinner, United States Treasurer (1802–1890), probably by Henry’s son, Titus Ulke (1866–1961) or another descendent. The rediscovery of the painting is of major historic and artistic importance. It is now on display in the library of Elasmobranch Research, Belgium.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ЖИВОПИСНЫХ ПОРТРЕТОВ РАБИНДРАНАТА ТАГОРА: ИКОНОГРАФИЯ И СИМВОЛИЗМ

The article examines numerous portraits of the outstanding Indian writer and philosopher of the twentieth century Rabindranath Tagore as a special phenomenon. The famous thinker was painted by dozens of artists, including Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganedranath Tagore, Mukul Chandra Dey, Atul Bose, William Rothenstein, Muirhead Bon, Boris Georgiev, Xu Beihun. Artists’ interest in the figure of the poet increased markedly after the award of the Nobel Prize to R. Tagore in 1913. Gradually, in the period of the 1920s – 1930s certain “rules” for the image of the thinker were formed tacitly. The authors of the article highlight the prerequisites for that phenomenon and analyze the existing iconography, which was especially actively manifested in the posthumous portraits of the poet. The article stresses several aspects and possible causes of the phenomenon. One of which is associated with the transition of Tagore’s artistic image into the symbol field: having gone beyond the boundaries of his native culture, R. Tagore’s portraits gradually began to carry a corpus of ideas related to the achievements in the field of science and art not only in India but also in the whole East, personifying its wisdom

Monsters of Military Might: Elephants in Hellenistic History and Art

Elephants were first deployed in warfare by Indian and Persian armies. The Greco-Macedonian troops first encountered these fearsome creatures in battle during the campaign of Alexander the Great. Subsequently, the Successors and later Hellenistic rulers similarly used elephants in battle. From this time, the animal began to appear in Greco-Roman art. Tracing the appearance of the elephant in Hellenistic history and art, I suggest that the elephant not only continued to be associated with its Asian and African origins and came to symbolize military triumph over exotic foes, it retained religious and mythic proportions as a fearsome, fabulous monster connected with the martichora and unicorn, griffon and sphinx, dragon and hippocampus. In particular, I re-examined the posthumous portrait of Alexander the Great in which he wears an elephant scalp as a headdress, similar to Heracles’ lion scalp. This deified portraiture not only depicts Alexander as descendant of Heracles and Dionysus, both sons of Zeus, but also—through connections with Ammon and Indra—as the legitimate ruler of the three continents of the known world, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The European Influence on Sikh Portraiture: Representations of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sher-e-Punjab (the Lion of the Punjab)

Maharaja Ranjit Singh was one of the greatest patrons in the early modern period of South Asia. Under his sovereignty, local ateliers like the Imam Bakhsh workshop developed and many European artists like August Schefft and Emily Eden visited the Punjab region. His reign was also the period of economic and social growth, which fostered the spirit of Punjabi cultural identity across the Sikh Kingdom. Representations of Ranjit Singh changed significantly from his lifetime to posthumous portraits; the latter is characterized by advanced pictorial expression rather than the simply realistic technique. More development is evident in the colonial period, when the number of single portraits increased perhaps due to the import of small media like ivory and mica. Portraits of Ranjit Singh represent increasing European influence on Sikh art.

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Indian Posthumous Portraits: MAA by Federico Carpani & Indra Kumar Jha

Indian Posthumous Portraits: MAA by Federico Carpani & Indra Kumar Jha

Athleta Christi

Count Tamás Erdődy (1558–1624), Ban of Slavonia and Croatia, one of the leading knights bannerets in the Kingdom of Hungary, pursued an illustrious political career: at different stages of his life he held several high offices of state, he was a successful participant in the fight against the Ottomans, he enjoyed the unconditional confidence of the Habsburg rulers, and he was nominated four times to the post of palatine, the highest position in the land, second only to the king. As a patron of the arts he was quick to recognise the potential power of visual devices. His support for the arts was closely connected to his political activities, and the works he commissioned, including the building work carried out on his estates, all played a part in his political ambitions and were linked to particular stages of his career. In his campaign to be elected palatine, he defined himself as Christ’s victorious warrior, a hero defending both his nation and the Christian faith. This was reflected in his chosen motto, “In Deo vici,” with its allusions to Constantine the Great; it was proven by the military title bestowed upon him, as a knight of the Order of the Precious Blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ of Mantua; and this image was reinforced by the heroic pictures of him, and by the posthumous portraits painted after them. Though it failed to achieve its political objective – for Erdődy never became palatine – the complex programme of patronage he followed, rare in the extreme in the Kingdom of Hungary in the early modern period, still dominates the way we regard this eminent nobleman.

Investigating a posthumous portrait of Augustus in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Investigating a posthumous portrait of Augustus in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Representing and reframing: J.W. Lindt’s Glenrowan, then and now

John William Lindt’s images of Glenrowan following the fall in 1880 of the notorious Kelly gang of bushrangers are among the esteemed Australian photographer’s most famous work. This is arguably a result of the photographs’ evidentiary status in relation to a significant event in Victorian history. However, an investigation of the way the perceived objectivity of these images functioned within the specific cultural context of their time allows for a deeper reading of Lindt’s work and its significance today. This article considers the circumstances of production, distribution and interpretation of J.W. Lindt’s Glenrowan photographs, and their relative evidentiary status as perceived in relation to other means of representation. It is found that while his iconic posthumous image of bushranger Joe Byrne conforms to the conventions of the posthumous portrait popular at the time, Lindt’s series also records the ‘media event’ of the Glenrowan siege and its aftermath. The photographs were distributed as a means of providing privileged access to the event, but may also be compared to alternative modes of representation in the press, such as sketches, which provided a different perspective that was perceived as no less ‘realistic’. Serving as documents of both a significant historical event and of the media and public response to that event, it is concluded that the photographs can operate as an entrance-point to discussions on multiple levels about Australian heritage. This additional contextualisation extends to the significance of these images today, as part of the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Collection.

Dutch Printer and Publisher Joan Blaeu II (1650–1712) Identified as the Subject of a Portrait by Michiel van Musscher (1645–1705)

The most famous seventeenth-century European printing, publishing, and cartography firm was that of the Blaeu family of Amsterdam. Founded c. 1599 by Willem Jansz Blaeu (1571–1638), it was continued through three generations by his son, Joan Blaeu I (1596–1673), and his grandsons, including Joan Blaeu II (1650–1712). Joan Blaeu II, along with his brother Peter (1637–1706), led the firm after the dual disasters of a fire that destroyed the printing plant in 1672, and the death of their father in 1673. The family gradually liquidated inventory, finally selling the printing shop in 1678. Joan II later would hold a number of civic positions. Although images of Willem Jansz. Blaeu and his son Joan Blaeu I are known, no depictions of Joan Blaeu II have been identified. The Amsterdam portraitist Michiel van Musscher (1645–1705) had painted a number of members of the Blaeu family including posthumous portraits of Joan I and his wife, Gertrude Vermeulen. This report presents evidence that a Van Musscher portrait of a previously unknown gentleman now can be identified by the artistic imagery included in the painting as a portrait of Joan Blaeu II. This imagery reflects his work as a printer, his civic position, and his connection to the Blaeu firm through its printer’s mark. This mark, used for the duration of the firm, was a distinctive design adopted by Willem Jansz. Blaeu c. 1622, and it pays homage to his scientific mentor and astronomical genius of the day, Tyco Brahe (1546–1601).

Between Memory and Amnesia: The Posthumous Portraits of Johan and Cornelis de Witt

Recommended Citation: Frans Grijzenhout, “Between Memory and Amnesia: The Posthumous Portraits of Johan and Cornelis de Witt” JHNA 7:1 (Winter 2015), DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.4 Available at http://www.jhna.org/index.php/past-issues/vol-7-1-2015/306-frans-grijzenhout Published by Historians of Netherlandish Art: http://www.hnanews.org/ Terms of Use: http://www.jhna.org/index.php/terms-of-use Notes: This PDF is provided for reference purposes only and may not contain all the functionality or features of the original, online publication. This is a revised PDF that may contain different page numbers from the previous version. Use electronic searching to locate passages. This PDF provides paragraph numbers as well as page numbers for citation purposes. ISSN: 1949-9833 Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art

Literature and journalism: inspirations, intersections, and inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert

1. Benjamin Franklin, Literary Journalism, and Finding a National Subject Carla Mulford 2. Walt Whitman's Journalism: The Foreground of Leaves of Grass David S. Reynolds 3. 'Not feeling very well . . . we turned our attention to poetry': Poetry, Washington, D.C.'s Hospital Newspapers, and the Civil War Elizabeth Lorang 4. The True, the False, and the 'not exactly lying': Making Fakes and Telling Stories in the Age of the Real Thing Andie Tucher 5. Elizabeth Jordan, 'True Stories of the News,' and Newspaper Fiction in Late Nineteenth-Century Journalism Karen Roggenkamp 6. Where the Masses Met the Classes: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Newspapers and Their Significance to Literary Scholars Charles Johanningsmeier 7. Fame and the Fate of Celebrity: The Trauma of the Lionized Journalist-Literary Figure Doug Underwood 8. Ernest Hemingway in Esquire: Contextualizing Arnold Gingrich's Posthumous Portrait(s) of Man and Artist, 1961-1973 John Fenstermaker 9. Stephen Colbert's Harvest of Shame Geoffrey Baym

John Keats by Joseph Severn: On Likeness and Life-writing

Joseph Severn’s first posthumous portrait of John Keats stands in a complex relation to the quality of likeness in biographical representation. Severn pictures Keats as an absorbed reader, whose unawareness of observation is and is not like his final obliviousness in death. A comparable scene recurs in memoirs of Keats by other friends, and likewise in his letters, in an imaginative movement that is both essentially fanciful and oriented towards the truth of a remembered relation. Severn tell us that his portrait recollects the last time he saw Keats looking ‘like himself ’, and this essay argues that comfortable, habitual unconsciousness is the foundation of this type of likeness too.